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Interesting posts for this morning.

Troll racials are overpowered talks about challenge with a focus on how it's reasonable for players to expect a game to present challenging content to them, rather than having to go out and find/make it. Especially when the game isn't advertised as a sandbox. Fair enough! 

One thing is that WoW has very very fixed progression. Pretty much every patch they level the playing field through new quested, heroic dungeon, and valor point gear. Current content is about how quickly you can learn the gimmicks for 14 encounters. Almost everyone can learn the first one or two. Almost no one will learn all 14, at least not for months. So there's your challenge, how far along that spectrum you are. It's so narrow! WoW is a huge, huge world with thousands of enemies, quests, achievements, and other activities, but the challenge in the game is only 7 enemies in one spot on the map. >.<

Tobold says there will never be stress-free healing, and I can't help but agree, for exactly the reasons he talks about. I've definitely been in exactly the situation he's talking about, as I've mentioned in earlier posts. I'd love to see a game where there is no healing. Everyone manages their own survival. Instead of being a healer, I'd love to be like, a bard, buffing my group, debuffing the enemy, clearing bad debuffs from my group. Instead of 'I keep you alive' it'd be 'I make you strong and make your enemies weak and vulnerable'.

Gevlon is lamenting the failure of his no-voice-chat project, and apparently only now discovering that success at a raid encounter has little to do with your actual output, and is more just about practicing the encounter until you learn the execution, or what he calls the gimmick or the dance. So he's just going to focus on pvp. Lawls. 

Here, the biggest issue I see with not having voice chat. Gevlon assumes that better raiders will simply execute better at everything they do. But that's not how it works. We all have limited attention, limits to how much we can keep track of at once. Certainly a good player is _capable_ of tracking boss ability cooldowns, enrage/frenzy timers, phase transitions, standing in fire, maintaining his rotation, and maxing his survivability. But the more things he needs to focus on, the less attention he can spend on any one of those. If someone is calling out lava waves, then I don't need to keep track of when the next lava wave is, and can focus more on my healing. With voice chat, a great player performs even better.